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Open Bazaar – decentralized Bitcoin marketplace

openbazaar.org

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Re: Open Bazaar – decentralized Bitcoin marketplace

#91
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is a good idea to pay someone for escrow services.

IIRC OpenBazaar still has paid escrow- it's just cheaper than eBay's fees.

Only in the case of a disputed between the buyer and seller where arbitrage is needed.

Re: Open Bazaar – decentralized Bitcoin marketplace

#93

Nothing is free, so here are my brief ideas for funding this: - Ads - "premium features" for sellers - "promoted" sellers - Fees for those that want to be "Secure Escrow and Dispute Resolution" accounts

According to https://www.openbazaar.org/about/ They founded a company, OB1, with a $1 million venture capital investment from Union Square Ventures and Andreessen Horowitz. [...] OB1 received a second round of investment for $3 million in the fall of 2016. OK, so just to clarify, this is a for-profit project produced by a central party with no stated plan for monetization. That is IMHO dubious. Their website http://o…

> OK, so just to clarify, this is a for-profit project produced by a central party with no stated plan for monetization. That is IMHO dubious.

For an early Bitcoin whale, a few million is negligible for a product that could bring crypto to the masses and dramatically increase the value of their crypto investment portfolio.

Re: Open Bazaar – decentralized Bitcoin marketplace

#94

It's just like Napster->Kazaa->Gnutella all over again! In 10 years there will be iTunes.

In what sense? This is not a file sharing platform. Also, money is exchanged here.

In the sense that it's not clear how openbazaar developers will earn money.

Re: Open Bazaar – decentralized Bitcoin marketplace

#95
People are talking about drugs or questioning that it is not exactly for free. But my big question, from the point of view of someone who has owned a small online store, is security for the buyer. In a completely p2p transaction, the biggest difficulty lies in the assurances that the two parties are completely satisfied with the deal. The first purchase is the most important move in any market, paying a premium so that everything goes well is not so bad.

Re: Open Bazaar – decentralized Bitcoin marketplace

#96

Hello, I am looking for a decentralized store that lets me: * Host digital goods (like run a server, or issue an asset ID that can be redeemed on a bittorrent style network for the file download) * Receive payment > register an asset or return a download key to the account of the user who sent it. I want automated digital good downloading, paying & receiving BTC. (Bitpay, Stripe etc pay in BTC but seller receives $Cu…

This comment isn't relevant.

Also, dude, you're gonna get caught up by the feds so fast.

Re: Open Bazaar – decentralized Bitcoin marketplace

#97
post #14

Seems to be some confusion... To clarify OpenBazaar's "No Transaction Fees" , it means there are no marketplace platform fees. To compare with ebay, to sell an item for $500 and charge $20 for shipping ($520): - eBay fee: ~10% of final bid value + 10% of any shipping charge added on = $52 - PayPal fee: 2.9% of payment = $15.08 The bitcoin network would eliminate the PayPal fees. (The bitcoin fees would still exist bu…

> The bitcoin fees would still exist but presumably would be lower than 2.9% Potentially, but Bitcoin mining fees are currently sky high. I made a couple of purchases recently for about $60 worth of Bitcoin, and the mining fees ended up being about 3.5%. Of course, mining fees are pretty much unrelated to the size of the transfer, so for high dollar amounts the fee is negligible, but ends up being a huge amount for s…

That was the case when the network was clogged, which should be much better now. For a 250-byte (avg) transaction you should be fine with 0.0006 BTC ($1.68, 2.8% of $60).

https://bitcoinfees.21.co/

You're right, bitcoin became expensive for small purchases, which is what the whole recent debacle was about. Hopefully Segwit2X fixes this, at least for a while.

Re: Open Bazaar – decentralized Bitcoin marketplace

#99
post #5

How does the unit economics work here? To my understanding, BTC (even after SegWit) has non-negligible transaction fees. Is this site just eating into VC money to make things feeless?

I'm sure you still have to pay Bitcoin transaction fees. They should really say that there are no additional fees to use Open Bazaar since it is open source.

They should really move to Ethereum. I have regularly been paying ~$0.01 for transactions that verify in under a minute.

Re: Open Bazaar – decentralized Bitcoin marketplace

#100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Can we find a way to help law enforcement police at the very least the really, really bad stuff? Law enforcement was designed to protect people (or their property) from the actions of other people , not themselves . Law enforcement is fundamentally incapable of protecting people from themselves. That is why the "war on drugs" has been so ineffective. The most effective method to stop the drug (opioid, etc.) epidemi…

Although I mention it in the comment, drugs aren't my primary concern. What about for example: child porn, forced prostitution, contract killings, etc. These things all existed before crypto-markets, it just seems like crypto-markets make life so much easier for these types of things (if they are as effective as advertised). Sure, we can police the "meat space" part of these transactions, but at what cost?

The existence of a marketplace does not constitute the existence of criminal activity, or vice versa. Rather than focus on the monetary transaction, I believe we should focus on the crime itself.

Pushing the monetary transactions for criminal behavior toward the public consciousness is, IMHO, beneficial to law enforcement, even if there is no clear or reasonable way to prevent or even track the monetary transactions themselves. So long as people are educated about criminal behavior, we can have a culture where law enforcement is actually effective; after all, real crime happens away from keyboard.

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